Earlier this week, I pitched a piece to John Oliver’s show, Last Week Tonight. We need some more media outlets to focus on the ongoing sagas involving fracked gas pipelines across the country right now.
Today I’m giving a shout out to all of the investigative journalists. Here’s my pitch: Investigate FERC.
I think there is a deep, dark story here worth looking into.
The World According to Dick Cheney
The older I get, the more I listen to my intuition. It rarely steers me off course. When it comes to FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, I get bad vibes. Dick Cheney bad vibes.
In my humble opinion, Mr. Cheney is one of the biggest evil doers in my lifetime. When I watched the documentary, The World According to Dick Cheney, I was unable to sleep that night. The story of his unlikely rise to power and his complete lack of compassion totally creeped me out.
Back in early 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group was created by an executive order by the President. While drafting the national energy policy, the group, chaired by Vice President Cheney, met with approximately 300 groups and individuals, ranging from the American Petroleum Institute, BP, Shell and the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America.
To learn more about what went on with Cheney’s Energy Task Force, click here:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cheney_Energy_Task_Force
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Just reading this one document by Sourcewatch about the Energy Task Force is enough to launch you down a long dark rabbit hole. Follow some of the links, dig deep, I dare you! It will set chills up your spine. The more you learn, the less you are able to look away, it’s like taking the red pill in the Matrix.
As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times,
- “What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn’t obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.“
Fast forward to 2005 when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed into law by President Bush.
This is the bill that put the famous “Halliburton loophole” into action. It made fracking by gas and oil companies exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and the Clean Water Act of 1972.
There were plenty of giveaways to the nuke industry and the fossil fuel corporations. You can learn more than you ever wanted to by taking a look at this piece.
Changing the clocks twice a year is really kind of silly, when you think about it.
The Energy Policy Act extended Daylight Saving Time by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November, with the hope that it would save 10,000 barrels of oil each day through reduced use of power by businesses during daylight hours. In reality, it is just about impossible to determine energy savings from Daylight Saving Time. When told the reason for daylight savings time the Old Indian said, “Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 expanded FERC’s authority, naming it the lead agency coordinating all federal authorizations a pipeline might need — such as clean air or other environmental permits
Ten years later, here we are in 2015, hundreds of grass root organizations fighting gas pipelines, compressor stations and offshore LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) ports like a huge game of Whack a Mole. FERC has become a rogue agency, working for the interests of the gas industry, with zero concern for the impacts on people, human health or the environment. We cannot allow this to continue.
We need investigative journalists to dig deep and connect the dots between Mr. Cheney, his Halliburton fracking pals, this 2005 Energy Act and FERC’s rubber stamping of every gas pipeline that reaches their desk.
FERC should be making decisions based on what’s best for all of us instead acting as an agent of the fracked-gas industry.
Who will dig deep and tell this Dick Cheney FERC nightmare of a story to the public? It would be fun for John Oliver to take it on, and as much as I love to see the comedians talk about these topics, we really need a top notch investigative news piece that will uncover the uncomfortable truths and shine some light on them. It will have to be someone who is unafraid of the gas industry and the wrath of dastardly Dick Cheney.
Any takers?
